The purpose of building a business website is to have a greater reach and to gain more traffic to help grow your business. However, it is very perplexing that despite having done each and everything as per guides available online; the results do not show any improvement. Or, even worse can happen. If you had huge traffic on your website, without any fault of yours if it starts declining, that would be a confusing situation because you are completely clueless about what went wrong.
Visitors on a website have different meanings for different stakeholders. While some people want to gain publicity by visiting a website, another group wishes to make money through the number of visitors on their page. Whatever the case is, the biggest advantage of more visitors is having a higher ranking on a search engine. There are certain measures to gain a better ranking, however despite doing all of it if a website continues having a lower ranking, there must be something else wrong with the website. In this blog, we have identified a few of the reasons that prevent your website from a higher ranking. Based on those reasons, we have suggested ideal responses to those problems as well.
Note: These measures can help eradicate a problem however these do not guarantee a solution to the problem. For a surefire result, it is important to seek the SEO services of a professional company. They can give strategic inputs and analyze website traffic to devise a better SEO plan for your website.
Difference between random traffic and ideal client
Before we dive into the problems of a website, let’s first establish what is desirable as traffic. There are many ways of increasing traffic to your website. However, you don’t want random traffic that has no interest in buying from you. You must identify the group of people who might need your services. This group is referred to as the ideal client. Based on their interests and demographics, you can speculate that these users tend to convert into actual buyers. You must find the right traffic at the right time to have a long-term solution for your website traffic issue.
Here are the reasons that can prevent the right traffic from connecting with your website.
1. Not using the right or relevant keywords
If your website has been running for many years now while you have been at the top in organic search, this does not mean you should always remain on top. Google and other search engines keep changing their algorithm for website ranking. It is quite possible that the keywords that you have been using in the past are no longer relevant, or they have become obsolete. Also, people might be using a variety of phrases or keywords to look up their desired content. in case you have been stuck with the old keywords, the lower ranking of the website should not surprise you.
With Google’s improved language comprehension ability, the results can be acquired with a natural language search input. To have a better ranking, keep things simple and write in easy language.
Google has also introduced long-tail keywords. This means websites are getting ranked based on complete sentences instead of a few words. These statements are natural queries. To deal with this problem, analyze the keywords and keyword phrases. If you are using low-ranking keywords, adopt a new strategy.
Pick the right keywords that are relevant and through which you would like to be searched on Google. Focus on those keywords that are more focused on sales, leads, or inquiries. If you have set up a new website, go for those keywords that are not highly competitive.
2. Content Duplicity
A website starts losing its search ranking if there is content duplicity. In case duplicate content is published on your website, Google will penalize the website by awarding a poor ranking. To avoid this make sure that the content on your website is unique and relevant to your industry.
3. Missing Links
Lost links are another reason your website is experiencing a decline in traffic. With the help of tools such as Cognitive SEO, Majestic, or Ahrefs; you can find out about your website’s status in the recent past. Get a report if your website has encountered any such issue in the last 90 days. In case of lost links, you should further probe for these:
What is the performance of website linking?
Which are the pages that lost their ranking? Are they the same ones with lost links?
Have any of the inbound links lost their ranking?
For all the lost links, trace their source or linking point. Once you have identified the origin, you can check each one to replace, remove or retain them.
4. Broken Redirects
In the absence of an effective 301 redirect plan, shifting your website to a new server will result in a drop in ranking. The same can happen if you have made major changes to your website. The most embarrassing issue for a website i-e error 404 can arise due to broken links. It is a nightmare for SEO professionals because there is no way of finding out whether the links are responsive or not. With the help of the audit tool, you can only get a report about on-site URLs whereas the old URLs won’t get reviewed.
To make sure that the links are functional, you need to test each redirect.
Avoid using redirect links and changing URLs unless it is critically important. And make sure to generate proper URLs right from the beginning, so that there is no need to optimize URLs.
5. Penalty by Google
At times a website loses its ranking on one particular search engine because of being on that search engine’s radar. Many instances can trigger a search engine such as Google to take any action against your website. You can identify this by checking your ranking on other search engines. If your website is performing well on Bing but is not doing good on Google, that means you have been penalized. If this seems to be the case, get to the bottom of the issue and fix it.
Keep checking notifications and warnings in Google Search Console. The warnings indicate an anomaly or violation of guidelines.
ESP Inspire
ESP Inspire is a reliable small business SEO company in California. Being the best local SEO Company we offer you our expertise, knowledge, and experience to offer you a highly effective SEO plan that can help your website get a better ranking and have more qualified leads.
